Multicore platform provider wins $10M

RapidMind, a provider of programming platforms for multicore CPUs, has received $10 million in venture capital funding. The startup will use the funds to grow its sales organization and to drive marketing efforts to expand its user base.

RapidMind (Waterloo, Ontario) provides the RapidMind Development Platform, which claims to enable the programming of multicore devices without requiring a knowledge of the processor hardware or sophisticated parallel programming techniques. The platform is available for NVidia graphics processing units (GPUs) and the IBM Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE) CPUs. RapidMind presented information about its products and approach to multicore programming at the recent Multicore Expo.

RapidMind originated from Serious Hack Inc., which was founded in 2004 to commercialize technology that was developed at the University of Waterloo in Canada. In March 2006, the company changed its name to RapidMind and announced that it had secured funding from BDC Venture Capital, but didn't announce the amount of the funding.

The latest funding round was led by Ventures West Capital Ltd. BDC Venture Capital also participated in the latest round of funding, along with EdgeStone Capital Partners. Robin Axon of Ventures West, John Kemp-Welch of BDC Venture Capital, and Laura Lenz of EdgeStone Capital Partners are joining RapidMind's board of directors.

"If programmers can't adapt to multicore programming, 2007 will be the year that Moore's Law stopped driving four decades of technology innovation," Axon said in a statement. "These are the kinds of watershed events that venture capitalists live for."